A Reply to the Heritage Foundation’s Smears

By Dominic Pino

Friday, August 25, 2023

 

The Heritage Foundation is exerting an enormous amount of effort to link the Hawaii wildfires with aid to Ukraine. I find its argument unconvincing. I wrote a post about this effort on Tuesday. It followed up on a post I wrote on August 10 arguing against Heritage’s framing of Ukraine aid as costing $900 per household.

 

Some people on Twitter got very upset by my second post, and now the Heritage Foundation, in a Daily Signal article by Rob Bluey, has repeated some misreadings of my post.

 

I interned at Heritage when I was in college, and I had a lot of respect for the institution. It was always a professional workplace filled with smart people. On the few occasions I have visited since my internship, it has been for deep and stimulating conversations about politics and policy.

 

That being said, the think tank’s framing of the Ukraine-aid issue and its subsequent misrepresentations of me and of National Review do not reflect well on it. In fact, several of Heritage’s own policy experts were making arguments similar to mine in the very recent past, yet I am now being smeared as one of the “neocons” whose analysis is “flawed.”

 

For those who might not understand how Heritage works, some background: The Daily Signal is essentially a house organ for the think tank. It employs some talented journalists who do good work. It also publishes pieces that try to create hype around Heritage research and activism. Bluey, in addition to being the Daily Signal‘s executive editor, is the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for communications.

 

The article, headlined “Nattering Neocons of Negativity” (which is a misquote of Spiro Agnew’s phrase crafted by William Safire, “nattering nabobs of negativism“), does little more than name-call.

 

Bluey writes:

 

The Heritage Foundation’s Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, ran the numbers on the $113 billion the U.S. has allocated in aid to Ukraine and found that it totals nearly $900 per American household, which will ultimately be paid through taxes or inflation (to be precise, it’s $884). The eye-popping number helps put the massive 12-figure $113 billion in perspective.

 

My post from August 10 was to explain why that $900 number isn’t as “eye-popping” as Heritage wants to portray it. It pales in comparison with the $39,100 per household the federal government spent on Covid relief, so it’s not true that the federal government prioritizes foreign emergencies over domestic ones. It also pales in comparison to the national debt of $256,000 per household, which is driven largely by entitlement spending. Demagoguing foreign aid as a fiscal issue is a common tactic politicians on both sides of the aisle have used for years to avoid talking about what actually drives the government’s spending problems. The U.S. could cancel all of its aid to all countries, including Ukraine, tomorrow, and it would barely even register on the CBO’s long-term budget projections. Heritage knows that, and it’s sad to see a think tank that is supposed to have an educational mission stoop to politicians’ level of argumentation.

 

Heritage then amplified the $900-per-household point with this post:

Arguing against that framing of the issue was the point of my post on Tuesday. Far worse than the $900-per-household argument, this was a truly grotesque form of argumentation. It is not true that “Biden . . . took $900 from them and sent it to Ukraine.” As I said in the Corner post, Congress approved this spending on a bipartisan basis, it did not raise taxes to do so, and not all of the money has gone to Ukrainians.

 

In pointing out that not all the money has gone to Ukrainians, I mentioned that portions of it have gone to American defense contractors, which employ Americans and contribute to U.S. economic output. That was twisted by Rachel Bovard, who posted a screenshot of only that paragraph, out of context, to suggest that I was arguing in favor of Ukraine aid so that defense contractors would make money.

 

Bluey repeats that line of argumentation in his article:

 

Pino, whose flawed analysis Stern easily refuted, seems to indicate we should support aid to Ukraine because it helps our defense industry and creates jobs here. Government spending for the sake of creating jobs is not a great policy choice, and it ignores what should really be debated: Is expending these resources—without a strategy, with no end in sight, in an environment of corruption—something we can afford? Is it the best use of resources? Should it be packaged with aid to American citizens?

 

I only seem to indicate that if you read Bovard’s screenshot instead of my post. The paragraph she screenshotted begins with “In addition,” a common English phrase that, when found at the start of a sentence, indicates there was more information preceding that sentence that would be crucial to understanding its meaning.

 

To be perfectly clear, I don’t care in the slightest how much money defense contractors make. Supporting government spending on munitions for the purpose of boosting GDP or employment is a broken-window fallacy that Keynesians believed. I was responding to Heritage’s argument that Biden took $900 from each American household and gave it to Ukrainians. That is not true for several reasons, one of which is that some of that money goes to Americans in the defense industry.

 

The post from Heritage juxtaposes a pleasant picture of Kyiv with a tragic picture from Hawaii, as though the two are related in any way. As I noted, the pleasant picture of Kyiv is a sign of U.S. policy success, not failure, since Russia tried and failed to take Kyiv and has demonstrated no hesitation about reducing other Ukrainian cities, such as Bakhmut, to rubble.

 

Gesturing towards the wildfires in Hawaii is neither here nor there. A meme made the rounds online late last year that said: “US taxpayer dollars are being laundered through Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop & Boeing while homeless Americans freeze to death this Christmas weekend.” That’s the same style of argument Heritage is making now: that people who support Ukraine aid are looking out for the defense industry at the expense of Americans in need, whether because of poverty or because of natural disasters.

 

About that meme last year, one policy expert posted, “This is a demonstrably false and shameful statement. In fact, major defense contracts are more audited then [sic] MOST federal spending.” That expert was James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation.

 

When in December of last year Monica Crowley posted, “You can’t afford groceries but Zelensky will be at the White House today to collect another $47 billion,” Carafano responded, “Better way to explain is money is going to legitimate self defense of 44 million Ukrainians & their defense is in US interest. We have high grocery bills because we have an idiot president & a feckless congress w/ trillions of reckless spending driving economy into oblivion.”

 

In February of this year, Carafano made a point similar to mine about how Ukraine aid isn’t driving the debt. “Ukraine support represents but a fraction of the $5 trillion deficit rung up under Biden,” he wrote in an article arguing that despite Biden’s poor leadership, U.S. support for Ukraine is still in the U.S. national interest.

 

Carafano also objected to smearing supporters of weapons spending as stooges for the “military-industrial complex.” In a post from March of this year, he said, “Military-industrial complex is complete nonsense-especially compared to big tech, banks, teachers unions etc–you have to be kidding me.”

 

Ukraine would not be a free country today without foreign support. One of the reasons I know that is that in September 2022, Heritage’s Daniel Kochis and Thomas Spoehr wrote, “Ukraine would not be a free country today without foreign support.” In that paper, they argued that U.S. and European contributions to Ukraine had been equitable, considering the U.S. economy’s much greater size than any European economy and the greater costs European countries are bearing in the form of refugees and economic harm because of their proximity to the conflict.

 

In my post, I argued that degrading Russia’s military capabilities served American interests, especially if done in a way that puts zero American lives at risk by funding Ukraine, which has proven able and willing to fight Russia effectively. That sounds a lot like the argument made in May of this year by Spoehr and Maiya Clark of Heritage, who wrote that “the weakening of Russian armed forces in Ukraine also carries tangible strategic value for U.S. national security interests.” They argued that the U.S. can support Ukraine while also being prepared to defend Taiwan against China, but that the U.S. must be able to increase defense production and spend the money necessary to do so. They argued that Congress should cut spending elsewhere in the budget and use the savings to adequately fund efforts to support Ukraine and defend Taiwan, a proposal with which I agree.

 

In other words, I am espousing positions that Heritage’s own policy experts were espousing not that long ago, and Heritage is calling me a “neoconservative” and National Review “pro-war” (as if we supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine) for publishing pieces critical of Heritage’s present stance. Spoehr is now leaving Heritage, reportedly over the think tank’s stance on Ukraine. As a former Heritage intern, I know that is a huge loss. Spoehr was revered and admired in that workplace, both for his long career of military service and for his leadership and mentorship of younger staff at Heritage.

 

He isn’t the first person to leave over Heritage’s stance on Ukraine. Luke Coffey, who was the director of Heritage’s Allison Center for Foreign-Policy Studies, left last year after being pressured by Heritage to delete a post supporting Ukraine aid. “Interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees reveal restrictive workplace practices to keep scholars in line with positions favored by Heritage’s lobbying arm,” the Dispatch reported.

 

On a Fox News segment, Rebeccah Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute debated Heritage president Kevin Roberts about Ukraine aid. Heritage’s position, according to Bluey, is that Congress should not approve a single penny of Ukraine aid “until Biden offers a robust plan to end the war soon.”

 

Bill Hemmer asked Heinrichs and Roberts how they would each define victory. Heinrichs answered with multiple specific goals: Russia gains no territory compared with the status quo of February 2022, Ukraine has a strong military to prevent future aggression, and other U.S. allies in eastern Europe are assured of stability and security by seeing U.S. resolve in Ukraine.

 

Roberts answered, “Victory is for lives, precious lives that are being lost, to stop being lost today. We believe in peace, and we believe it needs to happen immediately.” If you’re going to argue against Biden for not adequately defining victory (which Heinrichs did as well earlier in the segment), it would help to have a better definition of victory in mind. We all want peace — except Russia, which started this war and continues to pursue it, committing war crimes and, arguably, genocide against the Ukrainian people.

 

Without U.S. support, Ukraine is at a much greater risk of being overrun. Russia knows that, which is likely part of the reason why Russian state-controlled news source RT is highlighting Roberts’s opposition to further support. Obviously, Heritage has no control over what RT chooses to cover. But when you’re being highlighted on Russian state media, it should make you think twice.

 

By all means, carefully consider the best ways to provide support to Ukraine. But don’t categorically refuse more support and demagogue the issue while being unable to define victory beyond a simple desire for peace, and then name-call anyone who dares to disagree.